What's next? And in case I haven't mentioned, I appreciate everybody's input so far. Just a big learning adventure. When I sleep at night, I dream about this terminal as though I am stuck in the Matrix!

dnsmasq usage is causing network connection definitions to be ignored for DNS Servers and Search Domains. This issue is in all the Mint 13 releases from what I have seen. I suspect it's an upstream issue from Ubuntu.

The script at this link will create a solution that works between system restarts.

If dnsmasq was intentionally implemented there are tons of irritated network and vpn users. Especially those of us who like this distro at work where we have to configure DNS Servers and Search Domains. It also impacts being able to actually make a connection to an Oracle 11g database with the 11g r2 client (and probably any other database and client combination you are trying to reach on your network). Really frustrating. This is one reason I’m hoping Linux Mint becomes Debian based instead of Debian/Ubuntu. Although I realize there is a ton of work done by Ubuntu to polish Debian just as there is a ton of work done by the Linux Mint team to polish Ubuntu to the point we all prefer it over Ubuntu.

This could also be because your laptop is currently not plugged in with power supply and so the power management on mint screws up your wireless connection by disabling somethings.The following thread viewtopic.php?f=53&t=111658 pointed me to http://uselessuseofcat.com/?p=67 which solved the problem for me.

I had a similar problem. For some reason I can not guess, I lost my internet connectivity. Rebooting computer, router, etc, nothing worked for 2 days. Found this thread, tried some things, and the one that worked is "dpkg-reconfigure resolveconf"

I choose 'yes' for a few of the options that would allow dynamic updating of the config files.

The only thing I can say is that this is a complete mystery why this would happen. I've been running this version of Mint for almost 8months with no problems. Frustrating. I'm no noobie, been using linux for years. I haven't had this kind of network trouble since the 'win modem' days.